Just recently released in Australia, Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA has been reviewed by Chalmers Johnson over at TomDispatch, cataloguing a sorry saga of incompetence, political meddling, corruption & remarkable stupidity. As Weiner remarks, the Agency came into existence in response to the ’surprise’ attack on Pearl Harbour, & revealed its decades-long failure on the morning of 9/11.
Reading it, you can’t help but reflect on the complete cock-up that the AFP has dished up, presumably ably assisted by our own intelligence (sic) bodies, as regards Mr Haneef. The incompetence is either indicative of a culture of poor procedures & poor training, the impact of political interference or a delightful combination of both. The cataloging of stupidity & ineptitude has largely been from NGOs such as the Law Council, or within the judiciary, & has had some reporting from our fearless media. But little substantive analysis. A lot of alert but not much aware.
The question I keep coming back to is, who will be able to write a similar history of the AFP & our intelligence agencies, & given the catch-all nature of anti-terrorism laws & the continual weakening of FIO access, whether it would even be possible. Howard’s response to criticism of this Buster Keaton-like farce, is to insist that the laws will be strengthened, enlarged. As Weiner shows, such a response will only further entrench political interference.
I think perhaps you’re being a little too kind with references to ’stupidity & ineptitude’. The AFP/ASIO etc are prosecuting the GWOT, and part of that is terrorising both the Muslim community and opposition to the war. You can’t have war abroad without racism at home.
There is bound to be many ways to look at what has been happening,including the fact,the AFP is a large organisation,and individuals are dealing with inexact qualities in law, humans, understandings, attitudes, ..and then there is the problem of themselves as individuals and as officers. I do not think there is compelling evidence to say ,for example,Keelty is stupid and inept for all the long hours.That doesnt make for however, a stupidity and or ineptness when it comes to the inexact qualities.Be brave,Haneef is and so are the AFP. There is always tomorrow.
On a related note - couldnt help but notice that Mirko Bagaric is in Greece at Tony Mokbel’s extradition proceedings.
Hmmm…..
Ahem, speaking as a long and fond student of CIA’s history (Why no definite article? Well, does God need one?) I’d like to point out it was the OSS that was founded in WW2 and that CIA was formally established by the National Security Act of 1947.
And also to point out that CIA also enjoyed quite a few successes (at least according to the terms of its charter - your mileage may vary here) like Italy 1948, Iran 1954, Guatemala 1954, Iraq 1963, Chile 1973 and Afghanistan in the 80s. And of course their various actions there and elsewhere also delineated and popularised that wonderfully pithy term “blowback”.
I used to know a CIA resident once. He was a lovely old drunk who liked jazz and was useless at his job. Fortunately he went to Yale so that didn’t matter.
At least my favourite CIA operation, the Glomar Explorer caper (with special guest apperance by Howard Hughes) remains unsullied by all the policy and operational incompentence that Langley, its so-called political masters and its network of very special fellows have so often manifested as some kind of eerie destiny.
Consider the strange career of Yuri Nosenko.
The recent CIA revelations go back to the 1950’s. Lets hope an expose on what our spooks are up to today doesn’t wait until 2057.
The CIA is no more or less than the King’s secret police. They are purely political. The information flow to the people’s representives (Congress) is limited. It goes straight to the Prezidunt who tells them what he is interested in “discovering” in the first place.
since organizational incompetence and staff corruption are inversely proportional to public oversight (loomis’s law), an organization chartered to work without any public oversight is necessarily totally incompetent and corrupt.
before scientific analysis was applied to this matter, resulting in loomis’s law, popular wisdom approximated this situation with the concepts of ‘hubris’, ‘karma’, and the infinite corruptibility of man..
Since this topic is about the CIA and its misadventures, and the AFP (and ASIO?), should we not also talk about about “laws” that would enable the authorities to coerce
victimssuspected terrorists to acknowledge their crimes?Surely, if the AFP was able to have a signed confession from Haneef that he wrote the names in his diary, that he had given money in full knowledge that it was to be used in a terrorist attack…etc, would that not make the anti-terrorist laws finally work?
Maybe that is what Peter Faris is on about.
CIA was founded in response to Pearl Harbour - yes in 1947 - but the Central bit was the whole point. A body to act as a central point for intelligence gathering & analysis.
& CIA & success - Chile? Guatemala? Iran? Iraq? The thousands upon thousands that died, disappeared, the destruction of democratic states, the continuing dysfunctionalism - this is success?
Bernice,
No American President has been impeached over those atrocities. So yes, it can be measured as a success. There are a lot of corpses who never got their stories in the public realm thanks to the CIA.
The CIA is political and it serves their President, not the people. Its not there to serve the people of Chile, Guatemala, Iran, and Iraq either.
What loomis said. One point that civil libertarians should be constantly making is that giving police/spooks etc more powers tends to reduce their effectiveness for precisely the reason he pointed out.
It’s just Management 101 - poor accountability for results leads straight to poor results. The Haneef case illustrates this in spades.